Michael Chabon (8 page)

The Bellwethers, however, were no longer at the Casa del Highway on Route 16 in Albuquerque; they were in the driveway. They had barely unbuckled their seat belts before Mrs. Teddy’s Mom set upon them with a furious and fairly accurate account of our bad behavior; we could hear every word. Arthur jumped up and began quickly to collect the wreckage of twisted green aluminum that covered the furniture and the shimmering blue carpet.

“Get out, Cleveland!” he said. “Run out the back!”

“Why?” said Cleveland. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer.

At the time I thought this foolish, an overly cinematic gesture. I was wrong. In my innocent cynicism I didn’t see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn’t care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world. Cleveland simply foresaw his imminent need of another beer. An era of covert hatred and distance-keeping between him and the Bellwethers was ending, in what would probably be an unpleasant fashion, and he wanted it to end; but he would need help.

He had just popped the tab with the fingers of one hand when an elephantine, pink version of Jane Bellwether, in a big flowered dress, filled the front doorway. Mrs. Bellwether stared for an unusually long time at the severed screen door that leaned against the front of her house, as though this were all the damage she was, for the moment, capable of understanding. Dr. Bellwether’s head and left arm appeared in the shadows behind her, a garment bag slung over the arm. He spoke to us across his tremendous wife.

“We are going to prosecute,” he said, very softly, with an English accent.

Mrs. Bellwether entered her house and attempted to sink to her knees before Happy; but the dog, relaxed and regal and leisurely only moments before, shrank from her mistress’s touch and slunk off down the hall.

“What have you done to our dog?” said Mrs. Bellwether—to Cleveland, I decided.

Arthur started to say “Nothing,” but Cleveland interrupted him.

“We bashed her head with a ball-peen hammer,” he said.

Dr. Bellwether, who had stepped into the house, glanced quickly at his wife, who blushed.

“You were forbidden to enter this house,” he said, or rather I afterward realized that this is what he must have said. Each of his words was a softly falling little dollop of English mashed potatoes. This speech, the last I ever heard him utter, was apparently hard on him; he sat down on a hassock and let his wife do the rest of the talking.

“Where is Jane?” said Cleveland.

“Get out,” said Mrs. Bellwether.

Cleveland pushed past her; she fell against the fortunately empty birdcage. He ran out the front door.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Bellwether asked me.

“Art Bechstein.”

She frowned. “Arthur,” she said, “if you get out of my house right now—and take your young Hebrew friend with you—we will keep our two hundred and fifty dollars and will not call the police. That is only fair, considering the harm you have done to our house and our pet. Cleveland we will not forgive. Cleveland will pay for this.”

“Where is Jane?” Arthur said. He had drawn himself erect, in the way a drunken person will when alcohol cowardly flees in the face of whatever trouble it has caused, and he tucked in his shirt as though ready for business.

“She stayed on. She’ll be back in a few days. But not for Cleveland, she won’t.”

Cleveland came back into the house, beer in hand, wearing an ornate black felt sombrero, embroidered in silver thread, that he must have found in the Bellwethers’ car.

“Where is she?”

Mrs. Bellwether’s face lit up, and she said that Jane was dead. “It was awful, wasn’t it, Albert?” Mr. Bellwether shook his head and said something. “And here we come home in our grief, we want only to remember Jane in the peace of our own home, and what do we find? Depravity! Cruelty to animals! And you!”

Arthur started to speak, after Jane’s mother said that she had died—to deny, I suppose, the most ridiculous lie I had ever heard in my entire life, a lie made with such wild disregard for probability of success that I saw then how crazed she really was, and I saw that telling a good, simple lie was a sign of sanity; but Cleveland smirked, very briefly, and Arthur said nothing.

“Dead! No, it can’t be!” said Cleveland. “Not Jane! Oh, God, no! How—how did it happen?” He started to cry; it was beautifully done.

“Dysentery,” she said, less harshly, perhaps brought up short by the effect her lie was having on Cleveland.

“And this hat…” He was overcome, and could not speak for just the right amount of moments. “This hat is all that’s left of her isn’t it?”

“Yes. We had to burn her clothes.”

“Look, Nettie, in a minute I’ll walk out your front door, never to darken your welcome mat again. That’s a promise. I know that you hate me, and I certainly always hated you—until now—but I loved your daughter, passionately. I know you know that. And so—may I keep this sombrero?”

Here Dr. Bellwether raised a pale hand and started to speak again, but his wife overrode him and said that Cleveland might keep it.

“Thank you,” said Cleveland, and stepped over to her, and kissed her fat cheek with the reverence of a son. He put the hat on his head, then doffed it, bowed, gracefully swept the floor with the tacky thing, and split. He had won something: Now that Jane was dead at her mother’s hand, she was someone else, she was a girl without parents, which is the dream of every young man like Cleveland, if not every young man, period.

Mrs. Bellwether went over to the La-Z-Boy and fell into it. She had won something too, but it was something made up and pretty stupid.

“He believed you,” said Arthur in a suitably awed tone. “He’s probably wild with grief.”

“I hope he doesn’t try something foolish,” I said.

“Let him jump off a bridge,” said Mrs. Bellwether. “And good riddance.” A sudden pragmatic thought seemed to invade her perfectly factless mind. “You’ll tell him. I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll tell him she’s alive!”

“Gee, I just might, Mrs. B.,” said Arthur. He had sat back down in his chair and was lacing up his sneakers.

“Don’t tell him. Please. Let him think she’s dead.”

“But what if they end up on the same bus someday? Or at adjoining tables in the Dirty O?”

“I’ll send her away. I’ll send her down to my mother’s farm in Virginia. She’ll be safe there. Don’t tell him!”

Arthur sat up and gave the demented woman the relentless, clear stare that was going to make his career at the State Department.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.

While Mrs. Bellwether, looking pleased with herself, made out the check to Arthur on the kitchen table, I carried his suitcase out of the house.

“Nice meeting you, Mrs. Bellwether,” I called. “Shalom!”

We walked all the way back to my house. For some reason I felt depressed, and we didn’t laugh. Arthur smoked cigarette after cigarette; when I gave him an account of my abduction by Cleveland he only sighed; he cursed the humid weather.

“Do you feel bad because you failed in your responsibility to the Bellwethers, or something ridiculous like that?” I said.

“No.”

We reached the corner of Forbes and Wightman, wide, empty, and phony-looking in the light of the halogen lamps. Chained to one of the lampposts was the vending machine, now empty, that I had watched the dwarf fill with newspapers that morning. The sky to the south, over the steel mills, looked evil and orange and miasmic. We came to the Terrace and walked up through the maze of garages to my apartment, and I fumbled with the house key. I was still very drunk.

As I pushed open the door, Arthur put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face him.

“Art,” he said. He touched my face. His beard was too heavy, there was a puffiness under his eyes, and he seemed almost to waver on his feet, as though he might fall over at any moment. There was something so drunken and ugly about him that I flinched.

“No,” I said. “You’re tired. You’re just tired. Come on.”

And then, as the song says, he kissed me, or rather pressed his lips against the upper part of my chin. I stepped back, into my apartment, and he fell forward, catching himself as his knees hit the floor.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” I said.

“What an asshole I am, huh?” he said, standing carefully. “I’m just tired.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s all right.”

He apologized, said again that he was an asshole, and I said again that it was all right. I loved him and I wished he would leave. He slept on my floor among the boxes, while I trembled in bed under my cool, damp comforter. When I woke up the next morning, he had gone. He had ripped open his pack of Kools and folded it into the shape of a dog, or a saxophone, and left it on the pillow beside my head.

W
ORK THE NEXT DAY
was not the circus I had expected. People are always ready to hear that something disturbing was after all only a prank—and that includes the police, who had come shortly after my abrupt departure. I called and explained to them, and to my fellow employees, that the Black Rider was a Pi Kappa Delta brother, upset over the fact that I had been seen dancing with his girlfriend, but essentially a nice guy who had only wanted to put a little of the fear of God into me. This story went over big, and even earned me some points, in the strange estimation of the apprentice paramedics and the Pittsburgh police, for having had the balls to dance with the girlfriend of a Pike, notoriously large fellows. By eleven o’clock I was able to go about my work as though I had never been torn from the register stand, manhandled, and driven away on the back of a gigantic motorcycle, and the momentary vortex I had created in the usually calm surface of Boardwalk Books closed over me.

After work I stepped outside, weakened by air-conditioning, and tugged out the last cigarette in the pack. Arthur and Phlox, side by side, approached from the direction of the library. Phlox wore pearls, a strapless white dress patterned with blue flowers, and a pair of high-heeled white sandals; Arthur, light-gray trousers and a powder-blue blazer, with a tie, and oxfords without socks, like Prince Philip. They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell across Phlox’s necklace and Arthur’s hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.

“Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Arthur, when they’d reached me. I had about half a cigarette left.

“Hi, Art Bechstein,” said Phlox.

“Hello, Phlox; hello, Arthur. Wow.”

The two of them panted after their brisk walk through sunlight, admiring stares, and the posh resorts and spas of my imagination. Thin strands of perspiration hung across their foreheads.

“Did you go to work like this?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Arthur. “It seemed like a good day to do it.”

“Arthur and I had the same idea today. Telepathically. Come into the old library all dressed up. We created a sensation. Telepathically. For your pleasure.” She was plainly excited, by my undisguised astonishment at her lovely big face and by the handsome man standing beside her, his fingertips nearly—bewilderingly—brushing her wrist.

“Well, I’m very pleased,” I said.

“I could care less,” said Arthur, “about your pleasure.”

“Thank heavens,” I said.

We looked at each other oddly, as though we neither of us knew what exactly we were talking about.

“Ha,” I said.

“Let’s drink something cool and refreshing,” Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen.

“Beer,” said Arthur and I.

“Jane is dead,” Arthur was saying. “And everything is fine. That’s all.” He was drunk.

“But what did you do?” Phlox asked. She’d already asked him five or six times, and each time he’d blushed, looked down, and refused to explain.

“Do you want to know?”

“Ah,” she said, perhaps imprudently, “you’re finally drunk enough to confess.”

“No!” he said, lurching slightly into Phlox, who sat beside him in the booth, and spilling his fine hair across her bare shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Watch it,” she said, not taking her eyes from me as she delicately shoved Arthur back over to his corner. Each cool and refreshing sip she took seemed to increase the pressure of her unsandaled silken foot against my sockless ankle. In my drunkenness I’d lost any trace of the caution that had propelled me only the day before into the brambles along the Schenley Park bridge. I wondered suddenly (as suddenly as my eyes falling for the hundredth time upon her blue-flowered breasts) whether or not she wore a bra.

“Phlox,” I said, before I could reconsider, “are you wearing a brassiere?”

“Never,” she said. “Never in high June.” She spoke without coyness, without shock or outrage at my impertinence.

“Hey, Blanche DuBois!” said Arthur. “ ‘Never in high June.’ ”

She continued to look at me levelly and nearly without blinking. I began to get an unmistakable impression that this girl wanted me in a matter-of-fact, practical, and serious way. Arthur, I think, got the same impression. He stood up and excused himself, blushing again, but with a slightly businesslike tone, as though he had a job to do and were doing it.

“No, no,” I called after him. “Don’t leave me alone with this woman.”

I have a photograph of Phlox here before me; the only one in which she wears no makeup. Her forehead appears, quite frankly, tremendous. She has adopted a disheveled, Thursday-night-at-home-with-my-boyfriend pose, ripped sweatshirt collar dipped over one round olive shoulder, face uncharacteristically Levantine (her father was related to the great Pittsburgh Tambellinis), saintly. A faint something, a hint of redness in the eyes, suggests that she’s been crying; the lower lids seem slightly puffy. Of course she’s been crying. Her nose, as ever, looks big and straight and radiant. A few limp curls drape the vaulting eyebrows and silver screen of a forehead. And the eyes, the legendary blue eyes of Death Itself. Yes.